How Data Governance Can Help Your Decision-Making

From the minute an entrepreneur has an idea for a business, the story is written by data and decisions based on it. Data shows whether there’s a need and a market for the product/ service. It helps you set good price points, strategize marketing campaigns, establish practices that will keep customers happy and more.

It goes without saying that you need good data to make the right decisions. And, the only way to achieve this is with a well-thought-out data governance strategy.

Data governance is a set of rules and practices that defines how an organization manages and works with data. It is aimed at maintaining data integrity, making it trustworthy and keeping it secure yet available to all who need it. Data governance is required to comply with privacy regulations and make data analytics reliable for confident decision-making.

Data governance is not the responsibility of just a few people. Yes, there is a steering committee to set quality standards and enforce procedures but to ensure good governance, it must involve everyone from the IT department to business users and executives responsible for data entry.

Data governance focuses on continually measuring and monitoring data to improve data quality. When data quality meets high standards, the insights drawn from it become usable for decision-making. Let’s take a look at four ways data governance impacts decision-making.

Trusting data is critical to making data-driven decisions. Your team must trust the data to be accurate, complete and standardized to meet established policies as well as trust colleagues to use data correctly. Data governance helps create transparent data processes for collecting, storing and using data to create this trust.

By mapping the history of where data originated from and how it has changed over time, it creates a lineage that helps understand it and determine how suitable it is for decisions. For example, knowing when data about a customer’s age was collected can help understand the customer’s current age with a minimal margin of error and thus place him or her in the appropriate demographic groups.

When decision-makers have trust in data, they can use the insights gleaned from it with greater confidence and thus make strategic decisions for the organization’s future.

Siloed data is one of the biggest hurdles faced by decision-makers. A report showed that 47% of marketers found data difficult to access because it was siloed.